Poetics and Ruminationstag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-3810192018-04-19T01:00:00-04:00Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Poetry (and Everything Else), but Were Afraid to Ask.TypePadBirthday of THE BOOK OF FORMStag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201bb09fbf4e9970d2018-04-19T01:00:00-04:002018-12-16T12:04:07-05:00"Belongs in the hands of every poet, student, and teacher, for the greater good of the art." -- James Dickey.Turk

Fifty (50) years ago, on 19 April 1968, I wrote in my journal, "The Book of Forms has arrived! It has the most incredible art nouveau cover." The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, first edition, by Lewis Turco, New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1968. Paperback original.

The New Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics (second edition of The Book of Forms), Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986 (www.UPNE.com), ISBN 0874513804, cloth; 0874513812, paper.

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third Edition, Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000. ISBN 1584650419, cloth; ISBN 1584650222, paper. A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. “The Poet’s Bible."

The Haikutag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201b7c8f57fb2970b2017-05-06T16:57:24-04:002017-05-06T16:57:24-04:00The haiku has perhaps been best described as “a moment of intense perception.” Turk

Apparently, perhaps because recent books of poems by Richard Wilbur have been written in three-line syllabic "haiku stanzas," many writers have imitated his practice and by extension have decided that anything written in three short lines is a haiku. Neither Wilbur's stanzas nor poems are "haikus" in the traditional sense.

The haiku is a poem which has its basis emotiveutterance, an image, and certain other characteristics as well, including spareness, condensation, spontaneity, ellipsis, and a seasonal element. A distinctions has sometimes been made between the haiku and the senryu, though both have exactly the same external form. The senryu is an inquiry into the nature of humankind, whereas the haiku is an inquiry into the nature of the universe.

The haiku is philosophically an outgrowth of Zen Buddhism. Haiku translated into English tend to appear, to Western eyes, overly sentimental and to fall victim to the pathetic fallacy — overstated personification. We do not understand that the Zen poet is trying to put himself or herself into the place of the thing perceived, empathizing with the inanimate object. Moreover, the Zen poet is trying to “become one” with the object and thus with all things.

The haiku has perhaps been best described as “a moment of intense perception.” William Carlos Williams enunciated the American-British Imagist doctrine as “No ideas but in things.” Both conceptions are, if not identical, at least quite similar, for both are based upon the sensory level. Williams’ dictum and T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative” q.v., sever the observer from the perceived object, while at the same time preserving much of the effect of Zen empathy. An objective correlative is simply the vehicle of a metaphor. The theory is that, if the correct object that correlates with the idea to be expressed (symbolizes that idea) is chosen, then the idea will arise through connotation and overtone without being stated denotatively. It is through this objectivity, finally, that the poet in English achieves empathy — which is only a way of saying there is no such thing as pure objectivity.

Seasons of the Blood: American Poems in Japanese Formstag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201bb08539582970d2015-07-16T10:26:44-04:002015-07-16T11:37:46-04:00"The snake is eating its tail."Turk

The subject matter of Seasons of the Blood is straight out of Tarot, with the majority of the poems titled after suits and Arcana, and various individual cards (i.e. "The Hanged Man," "Death," "The Hermit," "The Tower"). The poems are all cast in various of the Japanese forms: mondo, katauta, sedoka, choka, tanka, somonka, waka, haiku, and senryu. The poet executes these forms with a deft hand, though Western symbolism sits uneasily in Asian poetic forms which eschew the sort of thing Turco is doing — but then, he has made them into Western forms, and they do work. Here is

CUPS

Moon takes the tide where

a tide must go: Light pierces

the hardest crystal.

Stone shall be filled with water,

and dust will be filled with blood.

These poems are written in the form of dialogues, as of one seeking and being given advice by a card reader. It lends them the power that such consultative procedures can often have, as in

CORRESPONDENCE

There is a black hole

in space, where the universe

is disappearing.

This is what I have read.

The scientists frighten me.

Have you never heard

of the hermetic dragon?

Do not be afraid.

What disappears is not lost.

The snake is eating its tail.

Stylistically, the poems are impeccable. If they come across as cryptic, it is because they are intended to function as Oracles: not as mirrors of the truth, but as tools through which an understanding of the truth may be approached. They collaborate with the reader, rather than instruct. Let me close with

PENTACLES

The heart is a coin

of fire. How shall we spend it?

How is the sun spent?

by Gene Van Troyer

Late Co-editor, Speculative Japan: Outstanding Tales of Japanese Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poems Three Poems from Seasons if the Blood.

Form of the Week 32, The Mote and Other Two-Line Formstag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201bb082797ba970d2015-05-02T10:31:51-04:002015-05-02T10:35:54-04:00The mote (motto, device, posie) is a one-sentence poem written in two lines. Turk

The mote (motto, device, posie) is a one-sentence poem written in two lines. Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro” is a mote; it is printed here as it originally appeared in 1913 in Poetry, complete with examples of sight pause — that is, spatial caesuras:

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound

The subject of the sentence is "apparition," and the verb "is" is understood at the point of the semicolon or, if one wishes, one can imagine an equals sign at that point:

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd = petals on a wet, black bough."

The entire June issue is devoted to two-line poems and photographs from Afghanistan

CHICAGO — The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is pleased to announce the publication of the June 2013 issue, “Landays.” The issue is dedicated entirely to poetry composed by and circulated among Afghan women.

After learning the story of a teenage girl who was forbidden to write poems and burned herself in protest, poet and journalist Eliza Griswold and photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy journeyed to Afghanistan to investigate the impact of the girl’s death, as well as the role that poetry plays in the lives of contemporary Pashtuns. A year later, Griswold and Murphy returned to Afghanistan to study the effects of more than a decade of U.S. military involvement on the culture and lives of Afghan women. In the course of this work, Griswold collected a selection of landays, or two-line poems [which are called “motes” in our culture – see The Book of Forms]. These poems are accompanied by Murphy’s stunning photographs from the same period and are presented in the June 2013 issue of Poetry.

Griswold describes the characteristics of a landay in her introduction:

“Twenty-two syllables: nine in the first line, thirteen in the second. The poem ends with the sound “ma” or “na.” Sometimes they rhyme, but more often not. In Pashto, they lilt internally from word to word in a kind of two-line lullaby that belies the sharpness of their content, which is distinctive not only for its beauty, bawdiness, and wit, but also for the piercing ability to articulate a common truth about war, separation, homeland, grief, or love.”

Clarinda Harriss responded:

"Hmmm. My own 22-syllable form, which I term" "vantadu," "Vantydu," or Vantydoo, pretending it is an ancient Malay form imported, like the pantoum, by the French, have little to no social conscience, and do not generally end in "ma," but 22 IS a very workable number of syllables.

Clarinda Harris"

Yes, Clarinda, The Japanese thought so too when then invented the katauta, the tanka, the senryu, and the haiku.

Correspondence with Alzo David-Westtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201b8d10240f2970c2015-04-13T19:43:46-04:002015-04-19T10:38:57-04:00I am writing to say that I had the chance to happily discover your Poetry: An Introduction through Writing (1973) at the campus library here at APU.Turk

Recently an American teaching in Japan, Alzo David-West, wrote to ask me about a book he had found in his college library:

2014

Dear Professor Turco,

Greetings. I am an American lecturer of English in the Department of British and American Studies at Aichi Prefectural University in Japan. In another academic universe, I am also an associate editor for the social science and area studies journal North Korean Review at the University of Detroit Mercy.

I am writing to say that I had the chance to happily discover your Poetry: An Introduction through Writing (1973) at the campus library here at APU. Despite my fondness for reading and writing poetry on occasion, my areas were novels and short stories when I studied for my degrees in English; and as you write in your colorful introduction to Poetry, I too “do not know the different prosodies of poetry” nor have I heard of “dipodics.”

As I am quite eager to learn more about these things, I have found your book to be a useful and friendly guide -- clear language, concrete explanations, and authentic examples -- in helping me become more aware of the types, structures, modes, and genres of poetry. Needless to say, I will shortly be getting a copy of your Book of Forms.

Meanwhile, reading Poetry my other academic incarnation has taken an interest in the chapter “Minor Genres: Didactics.” Basically, I am researching didactic poetry from North Korea, and in a paper I am writing, I describe one such poem as a “verse speech.” Interestingly, you use the term “verse essay” to describe didactic poetry in general.

Again, it is a pleasure for me to read your book, and thank you for writing it. That said, if it is not too much trouble, I hope we can exchange some emails in the future or now and then on poems and prosodies.

Kind regards,

Alzo David-West

Aichi Prefectural University

Aichi 480-1198 Japan

On Tuesday, September 30, 2014, at 9:58 PM I replied:

Thank you, Prof. David-West,

For your very kind message. I'm happy that you found my ancient text and that it was of use to you. I'd be pleased to correspond with you from time to time. You may be interested to know that my Book of Forms contains most of the information in the book you have, and that more material on nonfiction and fiction may be found in two companion volumes, The Book of Literary Terms and The Book of Dialogue, all from the same publisher, UPNE, in uniform format.

Do you know Jesse Glass, an American poet who has lived in Japan for many years? He is publisher of Ahadada books. One of his on-line, free, downloadable poetry chapbooks is my Attic, Shed and Barn.

Best wishes,

Lewis Turco

Dear Professor Turco,

How are you? Thank you for pointing me to your two other books. I will make sure to get all three of the UPNE volumes for my personal library.

Jesse Glass is new to me, but I did read his online edition of your chapbook over the weekend. (It is now Monday morning here in Japan.) “Attic, Shed, and Barn” and “John’s Telescope” are outstanding; “Bikes” reminded me of a similar accident I had as a child, and the vivid scene made me jot down “Yikes!”; “Spiders” communicates an excellent sense of observation; and “Ballpoints” made me ask, “Why so sad?”

All your poems are concrete and real, not abstract and ideal. (Btw, am I correct to describe your poems as “narrative poems”? In Poetry, you say narratives are a major genre.) Several images and phrases stood out to me.

I am glad I had the opportunity to read your poetry. May I ask for your permission to use “Attic, Shed, and Barn” and “John’s Telescope” in some of my English courses this semester?

Kind regards,

Alzo

Dear Alzo,

I guess I haven't mentioned that I have been to Japan, as a sailor aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, in late summer and the fall of 1954. I attach a PDF chapbook of poems written in the Japanese verse forms and published back in 1980. Charles E. Tuttle Co., published the anthology I mentioned in my last email message, Japan: Theme and Variations: A Collection of Poems by American Writers.

I don't have a copy of that here in Oswego, NY, where we are spending a couple of months before we go back to Maine, so I looked it up on Amazon and discovered that there is now a Kindle edition of it! Since I own a Kindle, I ordered it, received it immediately, and found that I had won third prize in the Tuttle contest! I had forgotten that completely, as well as two of the poems I have in the anthology. It's amazing to return in time to one's youth!

Yours,

Lewis Turco

Dear Professor Turco,

How are you? After reading your two chapbooks [Attic, Shed, and Barn and Seasons of the Blood,] I have decided to get a copy of your Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems, 1959-2007. (Is the title a play on William Blake’s phrase “fearful symmetry”?) There is a lot I am learning from your poetry, and for my aesthetic and literary enrichment, I really should have everything you have composed. I am looking forward to the publication of your epic poem The Hero Enkidu next year. Btw, I very much enjoyed your anecdote about Campbell Black.

About Japan: Theme and Variations, I will place an interlibrary loan order for it with my university library. Meanwhile, I was able to access part of the text at Google Books, and I could read your poems “New Song for Nippon,” “Elegy to a Japanese Garden,” and “Melody for Kyushu.” The second “spatial poem” (a term I have picked up from your Poetry) struck me as verbally and visually exquisite. The work is emotionally and sensorily captivating, and the adverb “prismatically” in the typographic flow simply fascinates me. I am not surprised you won a prize for this poem.

Japan must have been a very special experience when you were in the Navy in 1954. I recall another writer, Gerald Vizenor, who was in the Army in Japan at the same time. He has several collections of haiku, but I have only read his novel Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57.

Kind regards,

Alzo David-West

P.S. I read Seasons of the Blood immediately upon receiving the PDF, and I found the artistic persona to be different, more esoteric, than in Attic, Shed, and Barn. Still, there are similarities and resonances despite the differences.

Dear Lewis,

How have you been? Thank you for your last email and the wonderful neologism "pecuniast." I was delighted to learn of "Wesli Court," and I perused some of the available pages of The Collected Lyrics at Amazon.com. The poem "It Goes" seizes me somehow, and the phrase "souls of brontosaurs" is amazing. Who is "leola," by the way? I am constantly impressed by your poems and their range, and I fully agree with your artistic view that "the more one knows how to do, the more one can do."

Btw, here is some cliched and cringy piffle I jotted down a couple of weeks ago while my students were doing in-class work:

Her face is like the sun,

And when she smiles,

I feel so warm.

I kiss her in my dreams,

And my tears fall like rain.

We are doing poetry analysis (most important images, feelings and ideas, revealed truth) in my reading courses this semester, and I needed a simplistic example (alongside the better work) to help the students in one of the classes.

While I told them this bad sentimental poem is "not so good," they found what it was saying (desire, happiness, love, sadness) and how it is saying it sufficiently clear. I suggested "unrealized love."

But to get back to your point of creative knowledge, versatility, and practice, the illustrated limitations of the poem are formularism and tired phrases. Those lines have probably been written thousands of times before, and I was apparently following the six-step formula in Poetry for Rod McKuen's poems!

As [Richard] Londraville puts it in your book, "Formulas pander to those who prefer not to have to use their minds very much. [...] Formulas demand nothing except that one respond to them in superficial, automatic ways" (p. xix). Unlike formula poetry, true poetry allows us to "express or understand what is deepest inside the human mind and spirit" (p. xix).

Several of my students do not yet grasp the aesthetic significance of true poetry, and a few of them respond to emotionally searching and thought-provoking work in the most small-minded and egocentric ways. Here are two such cases on Langston Hughes' "Problems":

* "This is bad because it is not easy -- difficult."

* "This poem is not good because I can't understand it."

Comments like this, which are fortunately in the minority, say more about the reader than the poem.

Kind regards,

Alzo

“Leola” is no one, Alzo, a fictive character.

The poem is written in the form of a triversen. It's very early; I wrote it while I was in the navy.

Thanks for your newsy message. It sounds as though you're having a good time in the classroom. That's as it should be. I greatly enjoyed teaching myself.

Yours always,

Lewis

Dear Lewis,

I am very happy to learn about the triversen form. I looked up pages 95 to 97 in Poetry for the explanation and examples. I will have to make a closer study of accentual prosodies.

On "It Goes," it is to the merit of the poem that it made me ask who "leola" is. Perhaps a mimetic element in the fictive poetic world compelled the question. What is the authorial intention in the poem?

Apologies for the delayed reply. I hope all has been well. Thank you for posting the selections from our 2014 correspondence. Writing last year was a great joy for me. That said, I am happy to inform you that I assigned six poems from your Fearful Pleasures for out-of-class reading and reading reports in two of my reading courses this semester:

At the end of the semester, the students will do presentations on a poem of their choice, any that they feel is most emotionally and intellectually interesting. I personally hope to write a paper on “Burning the News” in the near future. When I read the poem, it immediately communicated to my intuition that the subject was the Vietnam War:

Although the trope is “Asia,” the self-immolation of the Buddhist monk in Saigon in 1963 was the first (received) memory the work evoked in me. I now see that “Burning the News” was published in 1968; yet what is notable is that the poem is not out-of-date. As long as there are great-power conflicts and wars in Asia, the poem remains current.

Btw, I read your reminiscence, “Horneteers,” a few months ago, and the piece struck me as captivatingly literary, indeed much like a short story. Some scenes that I found quite memorable were of the arrival and adventure in Cuba, “Hong Kong: King Kong of the Chinese Coast,” and the fighter plane and the trapped pilot sinking into the sea.

Sometime later, in the last two weeks of March, I accidentally discovered your online story “Silence.” After reading it, I was compelled to gather all your other tales available in Per Contra, Nights and Weekends, and Tower Journal. Up until that time, I was not aware that the famous American poet Lewis Turco is also a fiction writer.

Altogether, there were over 45,000 words on 118 pages that I printed out (two pages per sheet, double-sided). I read the stories on and off while the family and I were vacationing in the Japanese countryside. I see you write comfortably in the speculative- and memoir-fiction genres, and I did enjoy a number of your narratives a great deal.

Six stories that distinguish themselves to me in aesthetic and literary terms are (1) “The Chair,” (2) “The Demon in the Tree” (what a laugh I had at the end), (3) “The Ferry,” (4) “Kelly” (I recalled Asimov’s “The Last Question”) (5) “Matinee,” and (6) “Silence.” They are thoughtful, engaging stories. I would recommend them all to others.

Kind regards,

Alzo

Dear Alzo,

It sounds as though you've been exceedingly busy since last we corresponded. That's an interesting and unusual choice of poems for your classes! I look forward to hearing the outcome of the assignment.

Yes, “Burning the News” was written during the Vietnam War, so-called. It appeared in several anti-war anthologies during that period, and on-line as recently as last year in voxpoplisphere.com/2014/12/14/. .

“Horneteers” [published in Portland (Maine) magazine for April 2015] was, in fact, resurrected from the World Cruise Book of the USS Hornet (CVA12), for which I wrote quite a number of essays. In fact, not long ago I went back to look at the credits listed in that volume, and discovered, I think for the first time, that I was the only enlisted man who wrote for the volume, and that I wrote more than anyone else! I was about 20 years old at the time and just beginning to publish poems in the journals (including Our Navy). The officer who asked me to write was Lt.(jg) Douglas Kiker, who later became a journalist for one of the major TV networks. He is long dead, but I owe him a debt of gratitude.

You didn’t need to search the whole internet to find my stories, there are links to all of them on my blog, “Poetics and Ruminations” at www.lewisturco.net. My stories are collected in The Museum of Ordinary People, and my memoirs in Fantaseers. Just log on to Amazon.com for a complete list of my titles. Save yourself some work.

Form of the Week 34 – The “haikoum” (and the “sonnetoum”).tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201b8d0fb5471970c2015-04-03T13:17:49-04:002015-04-03T13:17:49-04:00While I was at the 2013 West Chester University Poetry Conference from June 4-8 I met many old friends and made some new ones, including Anna Evans with whom I discussed the pantoum and some of her experiments with it.Turk

While I was at the 2013 West Chester University Poetry Conference from June 4-8 I met many old friends and made some new ones, including Anna Evans with whom I discussed the pantoum and some of her experiments with it. This is the entry on the pantoum from the new Fourth Edition of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics:

The PANTOUM, a Malayan form, is an interlocking poem composed of quatrain stanzas, and all the lines are refrains. The meter is generally iambic tetrameter or pentameter. The second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the following stanza: A1B1A2B2, B1C1B2C2 and so forth. It can be ended with a circle-back to the two unrepeated lines of the first stanza, or in a couplet made of those lines in reversed order: A2A1.

THE EUNUCH CAT

She went to work until she grew too old,

Came home at night to feed the eunuch cat

That kept the mat warm and its eyeballs cold.

She walked, but ran to wrinkles, then to fat,

Came home at night to feed the eunuch cat,

Then went to bed, slept dreamlessly till eight,

And waked. She ran to wrinkles, then to fat.

She fixed her supper, snacked till it was late,

Then went to bed, slept noisily till eight —

Must I go on? She'll feed the cat no more.

She fixed her supper, snacked till it was late,

Then died at dawn, just halfway through a snore.

Must I go on? — she'll feed the cat no more

To keep the mat warm and its eyeballs cold.

She died at dawn, just halfway through a snore;

She went to work until she grew too old.

-- Wesli Court

When I got back home I found this e-mail message from Anna already waiting for me:

Dear Lewis,

It was great meeting you at West Chester and being able to talk about forms. Thanks for offering to consider putting my haikoum on your blog. Here it is, along with another two I've written and the information you wanted.

In April 2010 I decided to follow the National Poetry Month challenge of writing a poem a day, and in order to make this easier on myself I decided all of them would be pantoums. (Note: I knew this would be easier, but whether this is because I'm a formalist geek or simply because I'm obsessed with structure and control, I couldn't say!)

Of course, writing 30 basic pantoums in blank verse iambic pentameter quatrains would be incredibly dull, so I aimed for variations, and therefore over the course of the month I invented two new versions of the pantoum--the haikoum and the sonnetoum. A haikoum is 8 haiku which is also a 6 quatrain pantoum:

HAIKOUM

Red tulips bloom

beside wilting daffodils:

spring changes hands.

Storm-felled trees scattered

beside wilting daffodils:

the sky is too blue.

Storm-felled trees scattered

by winter's last big tantrum:

the sky is too blue.

Patched up, the fabric ripped

by winter's last big tantrum:

the quarrel is done.

Patched up, the fabric ripped

out of the family home.

The quarrel is done.

They have closed the blinds

out of the family home:

no one can reach them.

They have closed the blinds;

they will not come out again.

No one can reach them.

Red tulips bloom;

they will not come out again:

spring changes hands.

-- Anna Evans

TRIPLE LUTZ

The ice, newly smooth:

a sheet of crisp white paper;

the skate blades, the ink.

Skaters trace the ice,

a sheet of crisp white paper,

with strange loops and whirls.

The skate blades, the ink

emptied into new poems

strange with loops and whirls.

All life's sadnesses

empty into new poems:

white anesthesia.

Our life's sadnesses,

erased by skating backwards:

white anesthesia.

Keep checking behind:

erased by skating backwards,

your first strokes forward.

Keep checking behind;

avoid others in your path.

You're first! Stroke forward!

The ice, newly smooth;

avoid others in your path,

skaters. Trace the ice!

-- Anna Evans

MEMORY PALACE

The old poets set down words,

drinking vessels, purses, stones,

so they'd remember:

The frames of the songs,

drinking vessels, purses, stones,

the things they lived with.

The frames of the songs

lean like ancient monuments,

the things they lived with.

The day your parents

lean like ancient monuments

you cover your ears.

The day your parents

forget how to remember

you cover your ears.

Furnish the rooms or

forget how to remember—

pictures, figurines.

Furnish the rooms or

prepare to lose the building,

pictures, figurines.

The old poets set down words,

prepared to lose them, building

so they'd remember.

-- Anna Evans

A sonnetoum is 2 sonnets which is also a 7 quatrain pantoum, rhyme scheme:

I read "Triple Lutz" in New York and David Katz fell in love with the form. He has since written several, one of which, "Haikoum for James Dean," we published in the Raintown Review. You can reach him at <davidmkatz59@gmail.com>

I hope this is sufficiently interesting for your blog and please feel free to email me with any further questions.

Form of the Week 12: In the Footsteps of Bashotag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201b7c6fde610970b2014-10-31T11:00:07-04:002014-11-01T11:07:23-04:00"Here is a short collection of some modern English poems and versions of haiku and senryu titled 'In the Footsteps of Basho.'"Turk

I replied, "No, sorry, I don't. I do notice, however, that there seem to be many poems lately that use haiku as a stanza form. I'm afraid I don't understand why this is different from using any other quantitative syllabic stanza form. Aside from the syllable counts in each line, what is the object of using a five-seven-five syllable count in each stanza; how does the "haikuness" of each stanza impact the poem? What is the difference, even, between this stanza form and the triversen stanza of W. C. Williams (see "Form of the Week 2: Triversen)." I've been writing quantitative syllabics of various stanzaic syllable counts since 1959, and this haiku thing baffles me."

"Your bafflement makes sense! Frankly," Ned wrote back, "I think the 'haikuness' of such poems is lost: the stanzas become an organizing principle whose main function (from what I read) is to determine pacing. Its use in narrative is at odds with haiku's usual brevity. But I don't mind if the poem that results is strong in its own right, on very different terms."

At about the same time Leslie Monsour emailed me and asked the same question, except that it was about Richard Wilbur's use of the haiku as a stanza rather than Bryan Dietrich's. She wrote, "…here's an example of the haiku stanza I referred to in a previous message, which Richard Wilbur has used a great deal in his more recent poems":

A MEASURING WORM

This yellow-striped green

Caterpillar, climbing up

The steep window screen,

Constantly (for lack

Of a full set of legs) keeps

Humping up his back.

It's as if he sent

By a sort of semaphore

Dark omegas meant

To warn of Last Things.

Although he doesn't know it,

He will soon have wings,

And I too don't know

Toward what undreamt condition

Inch by Inch I go.

"So, you see," Ms. Monsour continued, "the stanzas are envelope-rhymed haiku. Wilbur has written dozens of poems in this form. I just wonder if he thought it up, or if it was used earlier by, say, Marianne Moore, or someone else. Tell me if you dig up anything about it."

"These are NOT haikus," I replied, "they are rhyming quantitative syllabic triplets with lines that have the same syllable counts as haikus. A haiku is complete in itself, but these stanzas are enjambed."

Even if they were not enjambed, however, none of the stanzas are whole unto themselves. Disregarding the question of form, the definition of a haiku is, "an insight into the nature of the universe." A senryu, which has the same external form as the haiku, is "an insight into the nature of mankind." In "Form of the Week 2: Triversen" I discussed William Carlos Williams' adaptation of the haiku to his triversen stanza system. He understood the concept of "haikuness."

Ms. Monsour wrote again, "I don't know if Wilbur calls these haiku stanza poems. I've heard the poems referred to as that, and I've actually used the term myself in my articles about Wilbur — something I should qualify from now on. Of course the stanzas don't stand alone as individual or linked haiku. I guess the term 'haiku stanza' has been bandied about simply because of the syllable count per line, per stanza. Your definition, 'rhyming quantitative syllabic triplets,' is certainly correct. Aaron Poochigian uses the form in his poem, "Kudzu: An Immigrant's Tale," from his current book, The Cosmic Purr (Able Muse Press), and A.E. Stallings also uses it in her poem, "Blackbird Étude," from her newest book, Olives (Northwestern University Press). As far as I can tell, Richard Wilbur established it."

The basis for the haiku in Japanese prosody is the katauta. There are actually two Japanese forms that are called "katauta"; both are formal, but only one is a stanza form per se, and both are based upon spontaneous "utterances" which, in the Japanese tradition, are sudden, emotive words or epithets. The first form of the katauta is an emotive question or its answer:

Am I in love? Birds are flying.

Do birds fly? I am in love.

A pair of such katautas is a mondo. Each line of the preceding couplet is a mondo. The katauta answer is not derived logically; it is intuited, as in the Zen koan or "unanswerable question," for Zen Buddhism is at the root of the haiku. The second kind of katauta is a stanza or poem form. It is made up of three parts arranged in lines of 5-7-7 syllables, these lengths being approximately breath-length, or the appropriate lengths in which to ask a sudden, emotive question and respond to it, also emotively. Seventeen syllables, as in the haiku, or nineteen, as in the katauta, are as many as can normally be uttered in one short breath; five to seven syllables are approximately equal to the utterance of an emotive question or its answer:

Why do these birds fly?

Where there is wind, there are wings.

Where there are wings, there is wind.

Here is a katauta written by Ezra Pound (the lines have been rearranged; nothing else has been chained from the original which was published in Poetry in 1913):

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition

of these faces in the crowd:

petals on a wet, black bough.

— Ezra Pound

The choka is a poem written in alternating 5-7-syllable lines:

WHEEL OF FORTUNE

TAROT in the Wheel;

mercury, sulfur, water,

salt. Mix well and turn.

The jackal-headed god bears

up under the spin,

rising. The Garden's serpent

slithers down the west.

The Sphinx in blue — a woman —

squats atop it all,

holding a sword against her

breast. Everything is

the same, despite the odd turns —

so say the Fixed Signs,

each reading somebody's book:

To the upper left,

Man with Wings; an Eagle to

the right, a Lion

under. And a winged Bull there,

lower left, scanning

his blank pages with the rest.

His blank pages, which

he fills with hoofprints, hoping

consciousness evolves

into Godhood somewhere, some

when. Caught at this point

on the Mandala, the small

bull confuses him-

self with Taurus, his Sign. It

is expected, to

be forgiven. He is not

affixed (nor is he

broken — not yet). He hopes that

all is relative,

and complete; that there is choice,

though all is finished;

that the smallest is the largest...;

that some sure thing

is accomplished by means of

these clumsy hooves, these

dull horns that turn to silence.

— Lewis Turco

The conclusion of a choka would be, often (though not in the case just given above), an envoy that doubled the last 7-syllable line: 5-7-7, or that consisted of two choka couplets with a doubled last line: 5-7-5-7-7 — the tanka.

Like the katauta, the tanka takes two forms, both of which are externally alike in that they are quintet poems with lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables, but in the first tanka form, called the waka, one subject is treated in the first two lines, another in the next two, and the last line is a refrain or paraphrase or restatement: 5-7, 5-7, 5. The first two lines are a dependent clause or a phrase, the last three an independent clause:

TURN

If you should waken

at the first turn of moonlight,

would you please follow

the silver road, not the dark

at the first turn of moonlight?

— Lewis Turco

The second type of tanka consists of two parts. The first three lines are an independent unit ending in a noun or verb after which a turn takes place: 5-7-5, 7-7. The triplet is an observation, the couplet is a comment on the observation:

CUPS

Moon takes the tide where

a tide must go: Light pierces

the hardest crystal.

Stone shall be filled with water,

and dust will be filled with blood.

— Lewis Turco

The word "hokku" is Chinese in origin, and in Japanese poetry it came to specify the first triplet of a renga chain which set the theme of the chain and was the most important part of the poem, the rest ringing the changes upon and elaborating the hock. The hokku of a renga chain ended with a full stop — it was complete in and of itself.

The Japanese renga, according to Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner in Japanese Court Poetry, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), is "Linked verses. Historically two different forms, both involving more than one author. The earlier form, called tanrenga, or 'short renga,' is a [tanka] whose first three lines were composed by one poet, and last two lines by another;...” This final couplet response is the hanka.

A renga chain or "long renga" is a poem made of a sequence of rengas and composed by two or more authors. The first triplet sets the subject, the succeeding couplet and all ensuing triplets and couplets amplify, gloss, or comment upon the first triplet. The term haikai no renga applies to the humorous renga chain, and it means, specifically, "renga of humor," according to Yoel Hoffman, editor and translator of, Japanese Death Poems, (Rutland and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1986).

By various stages the term "haiku" — a corruption and blending of the dissimilar words "hokku" and "haikai" — came to denote an independent tercet of 5-7-5 syllables. The haiku dropped all hankas, glosses, comments, and elaborations. It became a poem which had as its basis emotive utterance, an image, and certain other characteristics as well, including spareness, condensation, spontaneity, ellipsis, and a seasonal element. A distinction has sometimes been made between the haiku and the senryu, though both have exactly the same external form. The senryu is an inquiry into the nature of humankind, whereas the haiku is an inquiry into the nature of the universe. Here is a "found" senryu:

AN AMHERST HAIKU

Will you bring me a

jacinth for every finger,

and an onyx shoe?

— Emily Dickinson / Lewis Turco

The haiku is philosophically an outgrowth of Zen Buddhism. Haiku translated into English tend to appear, to Western eyes, overly sentimental and to fall victim to the pathetic fallacy — overstated personification. We do not understand that the Zen poet is trying to put himself or herself into the place of the thing perceived, empathizing with the inanimate object. Moreover, the Zen poet is trying to “become one” with the object and thus with all things.

The haiku has perhaps been best described as “a moment of intense perception.” William Carlos Williams enunciated the American-British Imagist doctrine as “No ideas but in things.” Both conceptions are, if not identical, at least quite similar, for both are based upon the sensory level. Williams’ dictum and T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative” sever the observer from the perceived object, while at the same time preserving much of the effect of Zen empathy. An objective correlative is simply the vehicle of a metaphor. The theory is that, if the correct object that correlates with the idea to be expressed (symbolizes that idea) is chosen, then the idea will arise through connotation and overtone without being stated denotatively. It is through this objectivity, finally, that the poet in English achieves empathy — which is only a way of saying there is no such thing as pure objectivity.

Here is a poem by William Carlos Williams which was originally arranged in four lines, but it was actually a senryu:

MARRIAGE

So different, this

man and this woman: a stream

flowing in a field.

-- William Carlos Williams

This following poem illustrates a number of the Japanese forms in the order in which they were developed:

PARADIGM

Why does the brook run?

The banks of the stream are green. — MONDO

Why does the stream run?

The banks of the brook bloom

with roe and cup-moss, with rue. — KATAUTA

The trees are filled with

cups. Grain in the fields, straw men

talking with the wind.

Have you come far, water-

borne, wind-born? Here are

hounds-tongue and mistletoe oak. — CHOKA

When the spears bend as

you walk through vervain or broom,

call out to the brook —

it will swell in your veins as

you move through broom or vervain. — WAKA (5-7-5, 7-7)

Have you spoken aloud? Here,

where the swallows' crewel-work

sews the sky with mist?

You must cut the filament.

You must be the lone spider. — TANKA (5-7-5, 7-7)

The bole is simple:

Twig and root like twin webs in

air and earth like fire. — HAIKU (5-7-5)

-- Lewis Turco

Here is a short collection of some modern English poems and versions of haiku and senryu titled In the Footsteps of Basho:

Form of the Week 2 – The Triversentag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201a73e0836c5970d2014-08-25T10:21:03-04:002014-08-25T10:21:03-04:00William Carlos Williams invented an American variable-accentual stanza in his "triversen" that is the equivalent of the Japanese haiku — or, more exactly, the three-line katauta,...Turk

Essentially, a triversen ("triple verse sentence") stanza is partly grammatic in prosody: one stanza equals one sentence. This sentence is broken into three parts, each part becoming a line composed of approximately one phrase. Thus, three lines (three phrases) are equal to one stanza (one sentence or independent clause). Williams, in attempting to explain this prosody, spoke of the breath pause — all that this meant, finally, was the process of breaking the sentence or independent clause into phrasal lines, what has been called "line-phrasing" or lineating, but there is a traditional term: the verset is a surge of language equal to one full breath.

Williams also spoke of the variable foot, and by this he meant the accentual element of the prosody: each line could vary in length, carrying from one to fourstressed (not necessarily alliterated) syllables, but generally two to four — no more than four because he hated iambic pentameter lines. He used this stanza quite often, especially in an eighteen-line form which may be considered the “triversen” proper:

THE ARTIST

Mr. T.

bareheaded

in a soiled undershirt

his hair standing out

on all sides

stood on his toes

heels together

arms gracefully

for the moment

curled above his head!

Then he whirled about

bounded

into the air

and with an entrechat

perfectly achieved

completed the figure.

My mother

taken by surprise

where she sat

in her invalid's chair

was left speechless.

"Bravo!" she cried at last

and clapped her hands.

The man's wife

came from the kitchen:

"What goes on here?" she said.

but the show was over.

By William Carlos Williams

The reason Williams invented this form and prosody, variable accentuals, is that he didn’t want to write in verse, specifically in iambic meters, even more specifically in iambic pentameter measures, BUT HE DIDN’T WANT TO WRITE IN PROSE, EITHER, which is what “free verse” is. What he wanted was a metrical system that sounded a good deal like prose, but that was, in fact, measured, at least to a degree…hence, the “triversen stanza” and the eighteen-line “triversen” proper, which perhaps was intended as a substitute for the ubiquitous sonnet of traditional accentual-syllabic prosody. Wallace Stevens wrote a triversen, one only, that discussed Williams’ statement of the imagist ideal, “No ideas except in things”:

Wallace Stevens

NOT IDEAS ABOUT THE THING BUT THE THING ITSELF

At the earliest ending of winter,

In March, a scrawny cry from outside

Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,

A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,

In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,

No longer a battered panache above snow…

It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism

Of sleep’s faded papier-mache…

The sun was coming from the outside

That scrawny cry — it was

A chorister whose c preceded the choir.

It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,

Still far away. It was like

A new knowledge of reality.

by Wallace Stevens

Notice that Stevens did not observe the stricture that there be no more than four stressed syllables in any line; Stevens, unlike Williams, did not hate the iambic pentameter line. Here is one final triversen, plus one epitaph written in triversen stanzas but not a complete 18-line triversen:

For a whole series of poems written in triversens and triversen stanzas, see “Twelve Moons” in my blog titled Poetics and Ruminations.

The Haiku in Englishtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201a5116fc55f970c2014-02-18T14:36:09-05:002014-02-18T14:36:09-05:00John Hoppenhthaler has asked me to post a definition of the haiku, but there is more complete information on pp. 294-6 of the fourth edition of The Book of Forms. This is part of it: By various stages the term...Turk

John Hoppenhthaler has asked me to post a definition of the haiku, but there is more complete information on pp. 294-6 of the fourth edition of The Book of Forms. This is part of it:

By various stages the term "haiku" — a corruption and blending of the dissimilar words "hokku" and "haikai" — came to denote an independent tercet of 5-7-5 syllables. The haiku dropped all hankas, glosses, comments, and elaborations. It became a poem which had as its basis emotiveutterance, an image, and certain other characteristics as well, including spareness, condensation, spontaneity, ellipsis, and a seasonal element. A distinction has sometimes been made between the haiku and the senryu, though both have exactly the same external form. The senryu is an inquiry into the nature of humankind, whereas the haiku is an inquiry into the nature of the universe.